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Sunday, May 17, 2015

Autopsy

The TV screens spent two days full of
grave talking heads that spoke their sincere lies. Bethany and five
other friends died from gas inhalation, the same gas that caused her
parents home to explode like the final scene in a movie where they
burn through their effects budget like virgins having sex for the
first time. It’s a fun image in my head and I think about it
through the entire walk to the town morgue. They’re gong to do
autopsies. I need to talk to the coroner, and I’ve run out of time
to put it off.

Because Official Questions will be
asked, the kind that lead to cutting bodies open. And I have no idea
what will happen when the coroner does that and finds that their
bodies were just skin and the contents of bones and muscles and
organs are really simulacrum made by tree branches and roots. I saw
the tree sprit do that, Dylan hiding the fact that their bodies had
been hollowed out days before and turned into puppets for Things from
Outside the universe.

I got Dylan involved. He saved me and
maybe the whole town too. And then went back to his small shack of a
home. Left me to try and clean this up. I’d laugh but I’m not
sure I’ll be able to stop if I start.

I’m not sure about many things
anymore. I know my name is Kate and that I’m fifteen and that even
a week ago many life was pretty normal. Before angles that frightened
shadows took me some place far from this world. Before a magician
saved me, saying that there was magic in me but he would bind it
until I needed it, until I spoke his name. A name he never told me.

Only I was changed. I sometimes see
things other people don’t seem to. When people talk I can hear
under their words to what they really mean. It’s not power: I’ve
seen real power and whatever I have isn’t that. But it’s enough
to mark me, to make me different. Enough to mean I’ve seen enough
to know I need to speak yo the coroner.

I’ve done my research. I’ve googled
him. I have no idea at all what I’m going to say.

Luxenford isn’t a large town as such
things go, but it does have the largest and most modern hospital
around owing to political favours a decade or so back and probably
backroom deals that define politics more than anything else does. All
I knew was that our hospital was full of apps long before that caught
on in even major cities and reason enough for a large morgue to be
built here in order to serve every surrounding town.

Emily Price has been the town coroner
for going on twenty years, only she is retiring – well, she’s
been saying she is for over four years – but this time she actually
hired an assistant. Emily goes to scenes as the medical examiner,
gets all the press and knows how to deal with them. Meanwhile, Ronald
Donald does all the work in the morgue proper. I didn’t dig up that
much on him, only that he was in his early twenties, probably
overqualified and had left a prestigious job in Toronto without
notice to move out to the middle of nowhere.

I was certain there was a story behind
that, but it might be even less interesting than what had possessed
his parents to name him Ronald. The morgue was half a block from the
hospital, an old brick building that had been a warehouse for some
company in the fifties. Now it stores bodies instead and boasts a
parking lot that is almost always empty. I poke my phone a bit,
finding out that there had been plans to make a family tribute centre
– aka a funeral home – as well, only they’d been nixed as not
being tasteful and too close to a couple of retirement buildings.
Which somehow didn’t nix the morgue.

I bluff my way past the receptionist
with the magic words of ‘school paper’

The assistant coroners office turns out
to be small, neat and tidy. Not a thing is out of place, not one
stray piece of paper visible anywhere. The metal desk looks clean
rough to use as an examination table if someone had to. Ronald Donald
himself is a tall, narrow man with glasses so thin they were
invisible in uncertain light. His clothing has a crispness to it that
makes it seem like forced casual, as though he is wearing jeans under
protest and his eyes are cold and hard as he looks me over.

I notice a small scar running across
his left eyebrow. I have no idea what he might notice about me until
he gestures sharp with one hand for me to sit in the lone chair on
the other side of his desk, sitting stiffly with his hands clasped
tightly together.

“You told Maureen that this is about
a school report, yes?” Ronald says, barely making it a question.

“I did.”

“I see. You were not friends with
Bethany,” he states as a fact it up for discussion, “and
participating in an autopsy goes far beyond a mere school report even
as a witness. I will not have the dead profaned in order to sell
pictures for a high school paper. You may leave.”

I take a deep breath. “The bones and
organs aren’t made of bone.” Ronald says nothing, but the silence
is a weight pressing around me. “They’re made of tree roots. They
will hold together until the funerals. I don’t know for how much
longer after that.”

“You are telling me that I have six
dead bodies without human bones in them.” The assistant coroners
voice is soft and brittle, and there are old pains under it, deeper
even than the fury that doesn’t show on his face at all. “Was
this the cause of their deaths?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you do this to them?”

I shake my head. I have no idea what
else to say.

“Very well.” He stands. “Follow
me.”

“What?”

“I shall perform the autopsy now. You
will witness it.”

I want to say that I’m not here for
that. That I just came to tell him about the bodies. But I’m not
that brave. I’m not brave enough to leave. I’m not sure I know
what bravery is anymore.

I stand. I follow, not daring to break
his silence, not even with my own.

The body Ronald performs the autopsy on
isn’t Bethany’s. The experience is quick: slice, peel, examine.
He snaps off a piece of wood, makes a few more incisions and examines
them without a word before stitching the skin back together in the
same silence.

“Will this happen again?”

I start, blink. “I - I don’t think
so? The creatures that - they were stopped.”

The assistant coroner looks over at me.
“We will have no further involvement, I trust?”

“I really hope not!”

He almost, almost smiles at that. “I
will make the necessary arrangements with the funeral home.”

I hesitate, then: “You’ve done this
before?”

The could-have-been of a smile
vanishes. Ronald Donald begins putting tools away, his silence a wall
between us.

“Please. I don’t understand any of
this,” I say; it comes out as a whisper. “The things I am seeing
are one thing. I can accept the world having more to it than I ever
knew. But how it - it intersects with everything I know…” I trail
off, shaking my head.

“If you do anything long enough, you
touch the edges of things that are not normal. Most forget them,
sometimes by their own choice. Sometimes not.”

I remember the power in the magician’s
voice and shiver a little as I nod. “I got lucky, then, meeting
you?”

“Heh.” He says it as a word, not
laughing at all. “Perhaps.”

And under the word are things he
doesn’t want me to know, truths that could only hurt if pulled up
out if the dark. I try not to hear, thank him and leave the morgue
slowly. It’s dark, and dad is going to wonder why I am late coming
home.

I have no idea what I am going to say
at all. I just walk quickly, trying not to flinch when I round
corners. Not wanting to remember the creatures that took my far
beyond the world I know. And I wonder if the coroner helped me
because he saw something close to kinship in my eyes.

“When I stop being afraid, I will
have become something the dark fears.” The words slip out like a
promise and it takes everything I have to say nothing more.

*

“Where
have you been?” His voice is a whip, is a crushing, but under the
anger a fear that takes my breath away. Who am I, that I should know
this?

A
week ago, I would have said: “Out,” made reference to the bottles
beside his chair. Now I say nothing, every word feeling like it’s
too much.

“Kate
Emilia –,” he begins into my silence.

“Dad.
Don’t. I can take care of myself. You don’t have to be scared for
me every time I’m out late.”

He
rocks back a step, eyes narrowing. “That’s what you think this is
about?”

He
doesn’t know. I almost laugh, choke it back. “Underneath, yes.”
I don’t say I’m not mom, that I’m not going to leave. I reach
for my own anger, can’t find it. I know him too deeply, hearing
what he is saying and the words under that.

You
can’t hate someone who loves you. Not when you know what drives
them.

“I
don’t want this.” The words slip out. “I haven’t –. It’s
not –.” The magician said I wouldn’t have magic, not unless I
found his name, not unless I spoke it. But this seeing, this knowing,
this peeling back: this I seem to have no matter what. I’ve been
marked and I don’t know how to undo it. It’s too much I don’t
have words for, not ones that wouldn’t hurt or confuse.

A collection of miscellany

Condoms will break, but I can assure you that vows of abstinence will break more easily than condoms.

- Dr. Joycelyn Elders

In fantasy, impossible things exist. In science fiction, impossible things exist and can be understood by humans. In supernatural horror, impossible things exist and cannot live in peace with humans.

- Will Shetterly

We are living in a time when you can believe anything, as long as you do not claim it to be true.

- Ravi Zacharia

Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.

- Richard Dawkins

In the time of harmony the golden age is not in the past, it is in the future

- Paul Signac

"No" is the wildest word in the English language.

- Emily Dickinson

The middle ground between genuinely true and outright faking is unconscious delusion.

- Dean Radin

“You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it’s hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it’s better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can’t write anybody’s book but your own.”